Win-7 Support for Intel 865G Graphics (HP D530 SFF)
I recently upgraded my HP/Compaq model D530 SFF (small form factor) Pc from XP-PRO to Win-7. The upgrade was very easy and went smoothly. Windows update automatically upgraded the ADI AC97 Integratd Digital Audio driver to Ver. 5.12.1.5410 and the Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet driver to Ver. 10.100.0.0., both of which are listed by HP as Win-Vista certified.
Unfortunately, it didn’t automatically update the driver for the Intel 865G motherboard graphics hardware. Instead, it installed a «generic» Microsoft VGA set of drivers. My particular D530 SFF is a 2.8ghz hyperthreaded P4, but according to the HP «Drivers WEB site» (for XP), ALL versions of the HP D530 have the same graphics hardware; so, my exact sub-model shouldn’t really matter.
Windows 7 runs robustly (at least as well as XP) on this nice little PC. In three days it has generated NO «system» or «application» log errors. The Win-7 notification center, however, annoyingly informs me every time that I open a Win-7 specific graphics program (even the Solitaire game) that my video card is running in «software rendering» mode with NO hardware acceleration. Even the Solitaire game runs very S-L-O-W-L-Y, but it runs without error. The Microsoft «DirectX Diagnostic Utility» indicates that DirectX 11 is running successfully on my PC and that it finds NO errors. It indicates (as I already knew) that hardware acceleration has been turned off.
I’ve tried to run HP’s softpac «sp31335.exe» to load the version «6.14.10.4396 A» graphics drivers that ran on this PC, when XP was installed. The softpac terminates before doing anything with a message that says «OS NOT supported.» Because the softpac graphic drivers are supposedly «XPDM» compliant, I suspect that they will probably work with Win-7 (even though they are NOT supported by HP and may have some minor issues). Anyway, I would like to set a «restore point» and give it a whirl. What have I got to loose, since there is NO data or programs installed on this PC (clean install). In the worst case, I would just have to reload Win-7.